Update 10-9-12

 

Hi,

 

A short series of follow-ups, some fresh news, then some new old news:

 

From Ed Albrecht in reply to Amy Kassak Bentley's question about the restrauant/bar on Mill Road that was across the street from Denny Ackers' house:  It was definitely called the Mill Road Inn, and I remember going in there a few times, probably to use the cigarette machine.  I also walked past it every day on the way to school, both to Harbor and South.

    Still, for the life of me, I cannot put together information about the railroad spurs you and other people are talking about.  Is it possible they were paved over on the roads you are talking about?  As far as the tracks in the woods, I'm afraid my Rolodex doesn't work the way it used to.  What scares me is Barbara Blitfield Pech doesn't recall the tracks, either.  I will research with my best friend, Google.

 

From Steve Cahn:  This is the only photo of the Mill Road Inn I could find.  Part of it is obscured for the obvious reason, but the photo still shows the name very clearly. 

    The link:  nassaufdrant . com/forum/reviving-good-old-days-photos-jobs-past-7313-7 . html   (yep, take out the spaces)

 

[Rich -- The obstruction Steve mentions is a fire engine, but if you look at the photo -- which is captioned "1982-or-so" -- you'll notice, there's already a "For Sale" sign on the building, center, just below the peak in the roof.  So maybe the fire only sealed an end that was already in progress.  The building has also been painted gray, but it was the red Amy remembered in the 50s and maybe 60s.

    There may also be some ongoing, follow-up conversations on Facebook about the tracks and the inn.  You'll have to check.]

 

From Robert Fiveson:  I found the whole discussion about the railroad tracks, what was where, and who remembered what, a bit spurious.

 

The fresh news, from Jean Cohen Oklan:  Hope all is well with everyone.  The color is becoming spectacular, as usual, in northwest Vermont, and the crisp air is telling us, "Get your wood in if you haven't already!".

    Next, some "sibling bragging rights" on my part:  for all the New York City moviegoers, I'm so proud of my brother, Bern Cohen, for having been part of a red carpet movie premiere at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC.  This was for his role in the Nollywood movie Doctor Bello.  Doctor Bello will also be premiering in New York City.  That's on November 23rd. 

    The following link is the promo video at Kennedy Center.  It contains a short interview with my brother.  The second link is an article from The New York Times.  Bern is yet another fabulously intelligent actor who graduated from Valley Stream South.  Check it out.

    shymagazine . com/shy/photos-video-doctor-bello-movie-premiere . html

    nytimes . com/2012/09/23/movies/nollywood-seeks-a-hit-with-doctor-bello.html?pagewanted=all&_moc . semityn . www   (delete the spaces)

 

Finally, the new old news:  Anne Barnett, Deborah Oppenheimer, Barnet Kellman, and I managed to have lunch on Saturday after a mere nine months of planning.  Anne and Deborah have stayed friends since grade school, so they see each other fairly regularly.  Deborah and Barnet have worked together on projects over the years, so they've seen each other.  Barnet and I see each other occasionally, while having lunch with other former South folks.  I'd also seen Anne, her mother Ceil, and her brothers Joe and Bob -- that would be Joey and Robbie in old time names -- but that was probably fifteen years ago, well before Ceil died, when Joe was just back from years of working in Nicaragua, and before Bob and his wife Laurie moved to Oregon.  I hadn't seen Deborah since the 60s, though she helped me a bit when I moved to Los Angeles in 1990.  Still, it was the first time the four of us were this near each other since the 60s.

    Back then, the Barnetts' house was next to the Eisbrouchs' on Forest Road, diagonally across from the school.  The Oppenheimers' house, on Firethorne, backed mostly on the Barnetts' but also overlapped the Eisbrouchs' backyard enough so we could cut through the bushes from street-to-street.  And the Kellmans' house was three houses down Eastwood from the Barnetts' and Eisbrouchs'.

    We're all well, and we talked about new stuff and old stuff.  Joe -- who really should have a distinguished alumni award from South though he doesn't want it -- is back working in Nicaragua after some years working on the Lower East Side and seven in Belgium.  Overall, he's probably one of the more adventuresome people from our time at South and maybe the most selfless.  Still, the stories I'm going to tell are some of Barnet's early memories of Green Acres.

    He and his parents moved there in 1950, when the new section was just being built.  He remembers potato fields covering much of the rest of the area, and houses that were merely stakes in the ground with twine tied between the posts.  There was a telephone booth on Forest Road, near where the path heads toward the creek.  I remember still seeing the wires in the ground but couldn't figure them out.  The booth was needed because the houses still had party lines, and people sometimes had to get phone calls through without waiting.  Front yards were dirt, with stakes and twine around them to protect the newly-planted grass seed.  Backyards hadn't been planted, either, and were barely separated, so the space between Eastwood Lane and Flower Road was one large playground.

    Barnet said that in the earliest days, in summer, people would put lawn chairs in their driveways and sit outside in the evenings, socializing with neighbors who'd steadily stroll by.  The chairs mimicked people sitting out on stoops as they formerly had in New York, often in Brooklyn.  A year-or-so later, patios were built in the backyards, which unintentionally began to cut neighbors off from each other.  Then the patios were screened in, because Barnet said the bugs were terrible.  Next, with the arrival of air conditioning, the screened-in patios were more solidly enclosed, and neighbors were further separated.  But in the beginning, Barnet said that Green Acres was a small, tight community, with families who'd never owned property first learning together about growing grass and planting trees.

    Barnet also said things often came in waves:  one family would buy a willow tree off a truck from a traveling vendor, and soon all the neighbors would have a willow tree in their front yards.  Then someone would discover that the maturing trees would tear up the sewage lines, and out came all the willows.  Similarly, patios were built by the same contractors, and basements were finished, often with the help of neighbors, frequently in identical knotty pine.  Anne remembered that Myrna Kiviat's father, Mr. Bernstein -- as I've mentioned before, I never did know his first name -- helped her father finish their basement, and I know he helped my father finish ours.  Barnet said that at one point Marilyn Scheidt sold trees that she grew from seedlings planted in coffee cans to people along Eastwood Lane.  She sold these trees for a quarter and planted them herself in the narrow strips of grass between the sidewalk and the street.  Almost sixty years later, some of those trees are probably still growing tall, if they haven't been knocked down by the successive hurricanes.  The big willow tree on the corner of Eastwood and Forest, in front of the school parking lot, certainly got knocked down a lot.  Then it was tipped back into place, or replaced with something smaller, until, finally, the school gave up, and took the tree out.  Too bad, because it was an easy tree for many of us to climb

    Barnet said he also had a game that involved that narrow strip of grass, which probably wasn't even grass yet.  When he was very young, he'd lie full length along the curb, then tip into the street and roll to the other side of Eastwood Lane.  What protected him from being crushed by a car is there weren't as many of them in the neighborhood then, and a person could go quite a while without seeing one pass.

    Barnet also remembered the annual Fourth of July community parties in the huge lot near the Mill Road entrance to Green Acres.  That disappeared when Safeway was built, and a road was cut from Mill to the shopping center.  And he remembered the old house just adjacent to this lot, which was used as a rental office but then abandoned and became the neighborhood "haunted house."  And he remembered the mounds of dirt behind Forest Road School, from the excavation, and a lot of other things which, even two days later, I can't recall just now.  But he did point out that we're all the collective memory of a time when communities like Green Acres and their adjoining shopping centers were first being built, and when we go, those detailed memories will simply be lost.

    So if it's a matter of remembering what the Mill Road Inn or Len's were, or where the railroad spurs ran, or what the name of the original pizza place in the shopping center was -- reportedly The Golden Crust -- we'd better figure these things out now and write them down.  Because, unfortunately, we're not going to be around forever.  Though we should be here for a good while longer.

 

The South '65 e-mail addresses: reunionclass65 . blogspot . com

 

The South '65 photo site: picasaweb . google . com / SouthHS65

 

 

Rich